Are the Hare Krishna/ISKCON devotees true Vaishnava Hindus as they claim, or are they cultists whose chanting and ornate temple programs conceal a hidden agenda? Since A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami brought the Hare Krishna movement to the West 50 years ago, journalists and ex-devotees have written about his followers’ abuse of women and children as well as their fundraising schemes. Join me as I expose the deep roots of these scandals in the literature and history of this neo-Hindu cult.

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Sunday, November 27, 2016

THE ISKCON GURU-FAKING BUSINESS

What makes a guru a fake? Let me count the
ways:

Trashing the
reputation of other gurus or religious figures with unsubstantiated lies and
innuendo, while advancing himself as the most authentic and
divinely inspired sadhu alive.

Expertise in aliening
impressionable youth from family and friends and replacing them with cult
sycophants whose initial welcome turns into a hell-hole of food and sleep
deprivation as well as semi-slavery.

Initiating hordes of
fanatic, ignorant disciples and using them as human pack mules to fool gullible
truth-seekers with get-enlightened-quick fantasies?

Gang-related activities
including harassment of and conspiracy to silence dissenters, whether by
beatings, threats, or murder?[i]

Child abuseconsisting
of, but not limited to parental alienation, loss of childhood, rape and
beatings, and abysmal educational quality.[ii]Ridiculous, contrived
belief systemfull of pseudo-scientific nonsense and vicious, bold-faced
discrimination against women and minorities.

If you think that any or all of these practices are
acceptable so long as the guru’s followers give out free food to the
poor[iv], WELCOME to
ISKCON!

Before you take out your checkbook or credit card, you
might appreciate some background information about the grinning cultists who
seem bent on convincing the public that they are “more Hindu than Hindus.”[v]

In
the words of the group’s founder, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami: “although posing as
great scholars, ascetics, householders and swamis, the so-called followers of
the Hindu religion are all useless, dried-up branches of the Vedic religion.”

This essay will establish beyond a reasonable doubt that it is ISKCON, not
Hinduism, which misrepresents “Vedic religion.”

The proliferation of Indian gurus in the West and the rise
of the cults of the 1960’s and 1970’s surged due to the hippie culture’s
fascination with Eastern mysticism. The Beatles, for example, were initially
entranced by the late founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM), Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi (d. 2007), and out of them, George Harrison retained his interest
in Hinduism, but transferred it from TM to the Hare Krishna sect also known as
the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

Other
practitioners of what Meera Nanda terms “neo-Hinduism”[vi]during
the same period include Sathya Sai Baba and Sri Chinmoy, both of whom still
have large groups of followers in India and the West. The influence
of all these groups waned considerably after the 1970’s and their international
reputation also suffered, fueled in most cases by allegations of sexual
impropriety. TM has been the most influential in popular culture: its practices
of meditation as a religiously-neutral means of self-improvement largely fueled
the West’s ongoing interest in New Age religion and disciples such as Deepak
Chopra have lent it a veneer of legitimacy that continues to this day.

ANTI-HINDU SCAM ARTISTS

This year marks
the 50th anniversary of Bhaktivedanta Swami’s coming to New York City in
1966 and founding the International Society for
Krishna Consciousness. By registering his sect a religious
nonprofit, the swami now had the means to accept tax-free donations
and open temples as a means to proselytize to Westerners as
well as the nonresident Indian population. A.C. Bhaktivedanta
Swami was an unusually charismatic preacher in an age of numerous competitors.
This one-time Calcutta
businessman used his marketing acumen and keen sense of the spiritual vacuum
affecting Western youths in the hippie era to build in little more than a
decade a world-wide organization consisting of thousands of disciples and many
temples on a grand scale.

However, few of the Hindus who throng ISKCON temples
and support their programs know that the sect’s founder, A.C. Bhaktivedanta
Swami, never considered the Hare Krishna movement to be Hindu at
all. The following are a number of statements Bhaktivedanta made in
reference to Hinduism:

The Krishna
consciousness movement has nothing to do with the Hindu religion or any system
of religion.... One should clearly understand that the Krishna
consciousness movement is not preaching the so-called Hindu religion."[vii]

India, they have given up the real
religious system, Sanatana Dharma. Fictitiously, they have accepted a
hodgepodge thing which is called Hinduism. Therefore there is trouble.

During the years following their guru’s demise in 1977, the
disciples of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (many now gurus themselves), reversed his
position on Hinduism as they grew more and more dependent on the wealth of the
Hindu community both in India and abroad. Instead of denouncing Hinduism, they
used the affection the Hindu public tends to feel for the folklore of the
butter-stealing, witch-killing, and gopi-loving Krishna
and conflated it with the teachings of the philosopher-chariot driver of the Bhagavad Gita. The message was clear:
Gaudiya (Bengali) Vaishnavism, with its Hare Krishna mantra chanting and
world-wide presence, is what Hinduism
should be.

CROSS-DRESSING BENGALI BRAHMIN AS RADHA/KRISHNA COMBINED?

Magnifying his own role as a self-proclaimed “pure
devotee” in a lineage of Gaudiya (Bengali) Vaishnava gurus from Chaitanya
Mahaprabhu (1486-1584) to himself was Swami Bhaktivedanta’s chief public
relations strategy. The term “Bhakti Yoga” led people
to assume that the swami was popularizing just another
strand of Hinduism as his predecessors had done. In fact, he
intended to supplant them all. For Bhaktivedanta, this meant teaching his
followers that he was the latest and greatest guru in the Gaudiya Vaishnava
Sampradaya, which he claimed was established by Chaitanya himself and consisted
of "pure devotees."

His modus
operandi was to initiate as many Americans and other Westerners as his
disciples and send them out
to open temples where he and his followers would
spread Chaitanya’s worship of Radha Krishna by chanting the Hare
Krishna mantra and dancing in front of opulently dressed murtis. Yes,
superficially it appears to be based on the tiny Gaudiya Vaishnava sect, which
worships the cowherd incarnation of Vishnu, Krishna, and claims that Caitanya
Mahaprabhu, a 16th century Bengali proponent of Bhakti-Yoga, was an incarnation
of Krishna and Radha combined. What sets the Hare Krishna movement apart at
first glance is its aggressive marketing tactics and habit of actively seeking
converts among non-Indians

Visitors were soon thronging to ISKCON temples to be dazzled
by the sheer spectacle of so many gorgeously dressed and decorated murtis of
Radha and Krishna, along with the Jagganath
idols of Puri and a grouping of five dhoti-clad men whom the devotees explained
were murtis of the Bengali saint Chaitanya and his associates. Accustomed as
they are to the profusion of murtis such as Durga, Shiva, Vishnu, and Hanuman
in Hindu temples, few visitors to the Hare Krishna temples would have realized
that Chaitanya, whose devotion to the Radha-Krishna legends and popularization
of congregational chanting (“kirtan”) is undeniable, was also the
cross-dressing leader of a cabal of Bengali Brahmins with similar practices and
tendencies. If not for the reverence that Hindu culture still holds for
high-born Brahmins, there is little chance of the Gaudiya Vaishnava contention
that Chaitanya was the incarnation of Radha and Krishna
together not having been greeted with laughter and derision as it is a transparent
denial of his behavior as a gopi-bhava afflicted transvestite.[viii]

INSULTS TO RAMAKRISHNA PARAMHAMSA & SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

Furthermore, what would Indian political
luminaries—the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi comes to mi nd-- if they
knew how the founder of the Hare Krishna movement derided the achievements of
the Hindu saints who traveled to the West many years before he set foot in New
York in 1966. His hostile and ill-informed comments
about Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and Swami Vivekananda Swami are
prime examples of Bhaktivedanta’s predilection to trash the reputation of the
predecessors who cleared the way for him. For example, during one of his
“Morning Walks” (08/01/1976), he claimed that the Ramakrishna Mission was
“simply bogus propaganda” and “they picked up two American ladies, that’s all.”

A worse combination of envy and breath-taking ignorance is hard to imagine. Perhaps
Bhaktivedanta Swami might have benefitted from reading the words of Dayananda
Saraswati, who in the Ten Principles of
the Arya Samaj wrote that “all actions should be performed with the prime
objective of benefitting mankind.” As for his charge that Vivekananda “picked
up two American ladies,” Bhaktivedanta could have learned from his example. In
this regard, it is well-known that the initiates of the Ramakrishna Mission are
all celibates, sanyasins as well women. Vivekananda Swami regarded celibacy
highly and his example continues to inspire millions of Indians dedicated to a
morally and militarily strong India,
including Narendra Modi himself.

FRAUD AND FALSE PROMISES: MAKING "THE ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS"

Bhaktivedanta Swami, on the other hand, valued
quantity far over quality in the choice of his disciples and thus quickly
accepted as his disciples young men and women who knew next to nothing about
his philosophy or personal history. These impressionable youths were simply
entranced by the exoticism of Eastern religions that was one of the many
escapist fantasies popular during the hippie era of the 60’s and 70’s. That he
abused their trust and held them in low esteem was apparent from the beginning.

I remember attending initiation ceremonies where mentally-ill individuals
scarcely able to control themselves were initiated as disciples and was
appalled at how quickly the dealings between men and women deteriorated due to
the poisonous effects of our guru’s absurd and vacuous beliefs about the inferiority
of women.

The hastily patched together arranged marriages the swami recommended
soon began to fail miserably and the children born of these hellish
relationships were taken away after a few years and dumped in gurukulas where
their sufferings and abuse left many scarred for life.[ix]
After he died in 1977, he left eleven of his disciples
to manage ISKCON and initiate disciples on his behalf (a sure sign that he
regarded those he so carefully trained as unfit to act as gurus). In short
order, they and others sprang to action to take his place and all hell broke
lose, with more mayhem and criminality than I can possibly treat in this essay.

Suffice to say, fraud reared its ugly head and infected the Hare Krishna
movement from the schools (“gurukulas”), the abuse of government-provided
welfare benefits to provide for housing, food, and medical care the cult would
not provide, and a highly scripted method of “distributing books” which was
nothing more than method to part fools from their cash.
These books the ISKCON zombies peddled were advertised
as the swami’s translations of puranic literature such as the Bhagavad Gita and
Bhagwat Purana (“Srimad Bhagavatam”), but were in fact pastiches of plagiarized
translations of other editions as well as the efforts of a few of his own
disciples who self-taught themselves rudimentary Sanskrit.

Before long it
became obvious that formal fund-raising techniques had to be employed and the
main target, as I mentioned near the beginning of this essay, was and is the educated
and prosperous Hindu community in India and abroad. However, this
pattern of what I call “guru-faking” was not limited to ISKCON and has
continued to grow, adapting itself to different conditions while the followers
of these gurus have begun to appear more like nascent terrorists than the naïve
thrill-seekers of my own generation.

[v]The issue of whether the ISKCON sect can be considered
Hindu was decisively answered in the negative by its founder/acharya A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. For a useful
summary of the supporting documentation, see the Hinduism Today Magazine article entitled, “Can it be that the Hare
Krishnas are not Hindu”?http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=4499.

[viii] See
Sri Caitanya Mangala, 2.9 and the numerous description in the Caitanya
Caritamrta (2.15-16; 2.18 112-119 and 203-208. Sri Caitanya’s associates
appearing on his sides in the temple murtis are Advaita, Srinivasa, Nityananda
Rama, and Gadadhara Pandit, each of whom Caitanya regarded as incarnations of
various members of the Radha Krishna and gopi legends.

About Me

Many thanks to the hundreds of readers who visit my blogs each day to read the 40+ essays I have written over the past 11 years. My sole motivation is to spare others the grief I suffered as a Hare Krishna devotee. I was ensnared by the cult in 1967 when I was a naïve, idealistic fourteen year old girl just about to begin high school. Thirteen years later, I escaped the hell that was and is ISKCON, having suffered terrible abuse and neglect during a miserable arranged "marriage."
Some of you who have lost a family member to these chanting cheaters have asked me for advice. Here are my recommendations:
Beware of easy fixes in spiritual matters in the same way you would avoid them when planning your finances. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Simply chanting a mantra and offering pranams to murtis and gurus cannot fool the Almighty; neither will donating money to build massive temples in India where most of the rural poor lack toilets and clean water.
Armed with the sword of truth, in these essays I attempt to dissipate the miasma of misinformation cults use to suffocate rational thought. I invite each of you to join me and support my efforts.